‘Damn Deleuze’: The Unexpected Artefacts of Reading Together

What does reading together produce? As we read A Thousand Plateaus together, Deleuze and Guattari butted into our dreams, our art-making, and our everyday lives. We found that their concepts were active, blurring the lines between theory, method and art. In this paper, we follow these invasions and interruptions of our thinking and living, collecting and discussing them as artefacts that help us make sense of reading and writing together as methodological, theoretical, artful inquiry. By taking up and sharing artefacts -- fragments of encounters, snapshots of artmaking, quotes from novels or poetry that embedded in our conversations about haecceity and becoming, and traces of texts sent back and forth in the intervening weeks between our meetings -- we dwell within the momentary becomings of reading together. We invite the reader to think with us about these artefacts and encounters and to make their own connections between theory, reading, and (academic) life. We linger in the practice of reading to wonder together, what does this do, how does this work, what does this produce (in methodology, in pedagogy, in research?

Measuring Monsters, Academic Subjectivities, and Counting Practices

In this paper, we explore the online academic research platforms we are entangled with as tenure-track faculty members in the neoliberal university. We are so embedded in these systems that the assumptions and constructions inherent in practices of counting are often lost, wrapped in the coils of counting practices—a becoming with algorithm. Though academic platforms are intricately enmeshed in our research and lives, they have been operating as “onto-epistemological blind spots” (Sweet et al., 2020, p. 2). And yet, the numbers they produce and rely on (H-scores, impact factors, citation counts, and journal rankings) matter and are “promiscuous and inventive in [their] agential wanderings” (Barad, 2015, p. 487), offering possibilities for intimacy and response-ability to what we are and might become. In other words, attending to the monstrous qualities of counting practices offers an entry point for re-thinking the relational, ethical, and affective aspects of academic subjectivity. So, we attend tothese qualities to become with the neoliberal counting and control mechanisms in innovative ways. Through this paper, we open ourselves to the wild possibilities of academic algorithms, working within and thinking with counting practices to intimately understand the ontologies of number at work in these platforms and how they work on our subjectivities. As we consider how our futures are being modelled and pre-empted, we think the algorithms in relation to feminist new materialist philosophers, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad. We ask: ‘what if?’ we were to think ontologies of number with these theories and see what possibilities emerge. We entangle Braidotti and  Barad with Deleuzoguattarian philosophies to imagine different relational becomings; to construct new ways of attending to our monstrous potentials and possibilities

Diet-induced obesity impairs mammary development and lactogenesis in murine mammary gland

We have developed a mouse model of diet-induced obesity that shows numerous abnormalities relating to mammary gland function. Animals ate 40% more calories when offered a high-fat diet and gained weight at three times the rate of controls. They exhibited reduced conception rates, increased peripartum pup mortality, and impaired lactogenesis. The impairment of lactogenesis involved lipid accumulation in the secretory epithelial cells indicative of an absence of copius milk secretion. Expression of mRNAs for -casein, whey acid protein, and -lactalbumin were all decreased immediately postpartum but recovered as lactation was established over 2–3 days. Expression of acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC)- mRNA was also decreased at parturition as was the total enzyme activity, although there was a compensatory increase in the proportion in the active state. By day 10 of lactation, the proportion of ACC in the active state was also decreased in obese animals, indicative of suppression of de novo fatty acid synthesis resulting from the supply of preformed fatty acids in the diet. Although obese animals consumed more calories in the nonpregnant and early pregnant states, they showed a marked depression in fat intake around day 9 of pregnancy before food intake recovered in later pregnancy. Food intake increased dramatically in both lean and obese animals during lactation although total calories consumed were identical in both groups. Thus, despite access to high-energy diets, the obese animals mobilized even more adipose tissue during lactation than their lean counterparts. Obese animals also exhibited marked abnormalities in alveolar development of the mammary gland, which may partially explain the delay in differentiation evident during lactogenesis

Cartographies of Memory and Affect: Nomadic Subjectivities

This visual essay maps an event, the lines of affect produced through the interconnections between memory/time, space/place, and the virtual/actual. The assemblage begins in the middle of these interconnections: lines of text interwoven with intensity and affect. As posthuman theory urges researchers to consider subjectivity as unbounded and nomadic, a process of becoming with the world, this article takes up arts-based methods to map and inquire into the flows between death and becoming as a generative, embodied, and productive process. This article suggests the methodological possibilities for arts-based analysis and inquiry to engage the entangled materiality of the posthuman present

Editorial: Thought in Motion: Erin Manning’s Imperatives for Educational Research and Qualitative Inquiry

Edit from within! Become world! Value, don't evaluate! Lure the feeling! Know not what a body can do! Create with concepts! Make multiple sense! Affirm all that appears! Play the differential! Speculate! Engage relations of tension! Make the relations felt! Create degrees of intimacy! Propose! Transduce! Create affinities of purpose! Forget what you feel! Return the return! Transvaluate! Pay attention! Go to the limit! (Manning, 2008). What does a philosophy produce? How might philosophy and methodology entangle, blur, respond, engage, interact, contradict, argue, provoke? Erin Manning’s process philosophy attunes researchers to the potential of difference. Manning grounds her philosophy in the notion that doing is thinking, that there is thought in the act, and that philosophy is an experimental practice that coexists with art; it is “pathfinding in the making” (Manning & Massumi, 2013, n.p.). Further, Manning posits that research and creation come together in their product, and the product is always ongoing, always becoming, always in process. Thought with qualitative inquiry, “the conjunction between research and creation […] make[s] apparent how modes of knowledge are always at cross-currents with one another” (Manning, 2016, p. 41)

(Wo)monstrous suturing: Woman doctoral students cutting together/apart

This paper centers the experiences and understandings of women doctoral students during two separate focus groups and collaborative collages. (Re)theorizing “monsters” as “intra- sectional” through Karen Barad’s and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s scholarship, we (re)position the “monstrous” as agentive and self-creative concepts. We explore the concept of (wo)monsters and the (wo)monstrous: empowered women participants who, through their verbal and artistic participations, cut themselves, others, and the group together/apart. In making these cuttings, they worked to (re)suture themselves and their group(s) back together in (re)generative, (wo)monstrous ways. The women’s participations emphasized their (wo)monstrosities as affirmingly fantastical, imagining new ways of being and wreaking havoc on hegemony and hierarchy